After a traumatic event earlier this year, I’m feeling ready to tell the story (as far as I remember it), so hopefully getting it out of my head will help me with moving on since these events are at the forefront of my thoughts pretty much all the time and also while trying to sleep. I’m doing much better than I was several months ago:) I broke the story up into 4 parts: the background, the discovery, the aid, and the aftermath.
[PART 1] The Background.
Just before summer (2021), I went up to Sinclair Island with my friend Taylor and my wife’s uncle David to assist in replacing some windows on his beach cabin. Several months earlier, I accidentally broke a spare pane of glass while I was painting their bedroom, so we figured we would buy many pieces of replacement glass to update several of their aging windows at the same time. It was quite the ordeal because there’s no bridge or ferry service to the island, so we had to transport giant pieces of fragile material from trailer, to beach, to dinghy, to beach, and to house.
Upon arrival (4 out of 5 glass pieces made it successfully), we had a beer after the strenuous work of moving heavy glass in a little dinghy on the ocean. As we made our work plan and settled down after the nerve wracking trip, that evening, someone came up to the house and asked if we had seen 2 ladies walking around since they missed their charter boat to take them off the island earlier that morning. We said no, and explained that we recently arrived and saw nobody as we were focused on working on the windows.
Sinclair island is a really small place. It’s easily possible that you could visit and never see another person - maybe because you ARE the only person there. Being on Sinclair island is quite relaxing since it’s so secluded and inaccessible, but this also makes it a survival sort of situation. There’s no stores. No doctors. No repairman. No groceries. If you didn’t bring it, you don’t have it. Only you can provide for yourself. There’s no help.
Most people get to the island via a boat that they hire which pulls up to the beach. They throw you and your stuff off and say goodbye, and there you are, standing there on the beach with your food and belongings to hopefully last you through your whole stay. As the boat drives away, the first thing I always think is, “I hope they don’t forget to pick us up, and I hope we have enough food.”
That paints a picture of how odd it seemed that someone walked up to us and said there were 2 mid-aged ladies missing. A. We saw a person. B. There’s two people missing. C. There’s really nowhere to go and get lost on the tiny island, so we thought they probably just lost track of time and missed their boat and went for a walk, or randomly met someone and went out fishing, or whatever. Something caused these ladies to miss their boat, but everything we knew was from the guy that informed us who was just a middle man. He got a call from the person on the mainland that expected to see the ladies arrive, so he was just checking up on behalf of that person. He didn’t know who these ladies were, and neither did we. This was the only detail we knew. So we said we would keep an eye out, and he went on his way.
After he left, we chatted about the encounter for a moment, but we shrugged it off as 2 ladies on vacation got into the slower island time and likely found something more fun to do than catch an early boat. We made ourselves a nice dinner after a hard day of work and explored the island a little before we went to bed.
The next day, we had a nice breakfast, worked all morning, and got finished installing the last window around noon. As I was cleaning up my supplies, I noticed a woman had approached the house, and she started talking to David. She looked concerned. David is sort of like a “mayor” or “elder” on the island. He’s been in the area a long time, and people know that he understands how things work.
I overheard the woman mention dead bodies and asked who to call to look into that since there’s no police or anything like that on the island. I overheard them mention calling various authorities, and then she described what she encountered. She noticed really foggy windows on a cabin, so she decided to peek inside since this was odd that no other windows on other cabins were foggy. When she peeked in, she saw 2 bodies on the floor and believed them to be dead.
When I heard this, I dropped everything because I had remembered the story of the 2 ladies that missed their boat the day before, and I thought the foggy windows could be a sign of breathing. Respiration makes fog. I asked where the cabin was, and she pointed to a small 10’x10’ shack directly next door. I told Taylor to look for an orange medical kit that I remembered seeing, and I ran over to the shack.
This moment changed my life forever. Part 2 of this story explains this discovery in more detail: http://www.josharch.com/blog/tragic-event-part-2